


Someone Has To

by Joysweeper



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: AU, Early in Canon, what if
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22879450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joysweeper/pseuds/Joysweeper
Summary: Rachel burned a week of her allowance on a bunch of small, low-profile watches that she and Cassie tested, morphing cat and newly-acquired squirrel so the watches that didn't work out just slid free of their shrinking wrists. The cheapest, ugliest off-brand Timexes, strapped on so tightly that they left imprints on skin, could morph with them. They were even water-resistant, which in practice meant sometimes they survived being wet and sometimes they'd stop working.It wasn't the best way to keep time. Someone had to be human to check the watch, or else take it off before morphing and leave it somewhere it could be seen. But all four of them wore one almost all the time, and Tobias kept an eye out when they removed one.Scenes from the Prince Rachel AU I've been thinking about for a while.
Relationships: Cassie & Rachel (Animorphs), Marco & Rachel (Animorphs), Rachel & Tobias
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13





	Someone Has To

**Author's Note:**

> When people hear "AU where Rachel is the leader", they tend to think of The Weakness, but that book's Rachel is very unlike the Rachel you see in the early books. Early canon Rachel is much more cautious and has more ideas about what the group should do. She's a lot like Jake, actually, and it's easy to see them taking each others' roles.

They were at the food court at the mall, after Jake had followed Chapman in lizard morph. He’d told them about what he’d found, what he’d heard before the assistant principal closed the door behind him.

Rachel was absolutely going down there. Those alien creeps had her cousin and now she knew where! Hearing Marco drag his feet and talk about turning his back on Tom and the Yeerks and everything just made her feel more contrary, but Rachel glanced around the table. Jake and Tobias were already for it enough, and it didn’t look like Cassie was going to protest.

So she said, “There’s gonna be Taxxons and Hork-Bajir down there, right?”

“They’re sure not here lining up for Taco Bell,” Marco quipped, and she saw Tobias scowl.

“Right, so they’ll be at the Yeerk Pool. If they’re there and we just rush down and meet them…” She made a fist and hit it into her other hand, then hurried on as Marco opened his mouth. “I’m saying we need to find out some more. Sneak in there and get the lay of the land, and if it looks good, _then_ we can attack.”

This took some of the tension out of Marco’s shoulders, though he still looked sour. “Oh, sure. What animal can sneak into an evil lair deep underground? _Don’t_ say bugs. I am not turning into a bug.”

“Bats?” Cassie asked, then when they looked at her she said, “Bats. If it’s dark that won’t bother them, and they can fly a long ways and cling to walls. We have some in the clinic. Little brown bats roost in caves and buildings, so they won’t stand out like birds would.”

“Aren’t bats blind?” Jake wondered. “How will we even know what’s happening?”

“I’m happy with just my hawk morph. I don’t want to be something with worse eyes than a human,” Tobias groused to himself, though he seemed happier now that they were talking about taking action.

“If you haven’t noticed, hawks are big and obvious indoors,” Rachel told him in an undertone. “We need as many useful morphs as we can get.”

Cassie was shaking her head. “No, bats can see. Anyway, they mostly use echolocation. It’s not quite the same as sight, but it lets them fly around and catch little bugs, even in complete darkness. They’re mammals, like we are. It might be easier to be a bat than a lizard.” She cast an apologetic look at Jake.

“Wait, really? You really want to turn into bug-eating rats that think they’re birds to poke around the school’s under-basement and try and find aliens?” That was Marco, of course.

“It’s scaring me too, but we can’t put this on anyone else,” Rachel said. “And I am not letting Jake go in alone. You guys don’t have to go.”

Jake shot her a look, half-grateful, half-guilty. “He’s my brother, and he’s going tonight. I have to save him.”

Tobias nodded eagerly. “I’m going. For the Andalite. Even if I have to morph a bat.”

“I can’t believe you guys. This is insane,” Marco said, shaking his head, glaring impartially around the table. “No, shut up! No one say anything! I’m going, because Jake’s my best friend. I’m in to rescue Tom and then that’s it, I’m _done_.”

They all looked at Cassie then, who was dreamy-eyed. “I feel like we’re in the old days. The _really_ old days, you know, when people thought animals had spirits and they could call on their strengths to protect them from evil. The power of the bear, the cunning of the fox. The eyes of the eagle. Or the hawk,” she added with a smile at Tobias. “We’re calling on animals to help us.”

On some level or other, Cassie clearly still believed that. Rachel didn’t say it. There were things she would rib her friend for, and things she dropped, and she cut in before Marco could get snide. “You’re right enough. All we have going for us is this animal morphing thing. And so far the only morphs we've acquired are a cat, a bird, a dog, a horse, and a lizard. We’re going to get a bat, but we need a little more firepower. We should head for The Gardens. We need to acquire more DNA — from some animals that are not going to be easy to acquire."

“Cassie, can you get us in?” Jake asked.

"I can get in free," she said. "You guys will have to pay, but I can use my mom's employee discount, so it'll be cheaper." Rachel saw both Marco and Tobias react, very slightly, clearly not wanting anyone to notice.

"Oh, I'm sure we could talk them into letting us in for nothing," Marco said. "Just tell them we're Animorphs."

* * *

The big bull elephant went still as she thought hard about becoming him. His trunk was deeply wrinkly, which she'd expected, and also scattered with coarse, sparse hairs standing straight out, which she hadn't. The drowsing elephant sighed, and she smiled.

“This is amazing,” Rachel said, completely forgetting to be cool about it. She cast a glance back at Cassie and Tobias. "You get in on this too.”

They didn’t immediately agree, and she made a face. "Oh, come on. We couldn't get the water buffalo or the rhino to let us touch them, and what else is close enough? Giraffes? Wow, _they’re_ a good idea. The longer we wander around the more likely we'll be caught."

Cassie probably knew every animal in the Gardens and if hippos or giraffes or whatever would be good in a fight, but she’d been worrying about her mom finding out about this trip. She drew closer and touched the elephant's trunk, murmuring to the big animal. Tobias looked away mutinously. “I told you, I’m good.”

"I'm not saying you have to hang out as Dumbo, but you should get it while it's here," Rachel argued, hanging on to her fraying patience. “Come on, Tobias, be huge with us. Be _able_ to be huge with us, whatever. Then we’ll go and try and find the boys.”

Reluctantly Tobias approached and stretched out his hand. Rachel had a quiet, mean suspicion that he was only pretending to acquire the elephant, who was still logy with Cassie’s touch. There was no way to tell.

“He’s beautiful,” Cassie murmured, looking up. Rachel followed her gaze and looked into the elephant’s red-brown eye, half closed and framed with long, pale, messy lashes. Despite herself she had to think it would be an ugly look on her, but on the bull himself…

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, he is.”

* * *

After leaving the Gardens they all went back to Cassie’s barn and passed a tiny leathery-winged bat around. Marco made superhero jokes, and then he and Jake split off and started home together. Tobias morphed hawk and flew away, leaving his clothing and backpack in the barn. They’d have to get those back to him.

Rachel knew she didn’t need to be home too desperately, and decided to try bat morph on for size. She’d morphed before, with Cassie, but while Cassie had taken to it Rachel had felt like a clumsy, melting freak while she was changing, and then the horse’s instincts had been all fear and lashing out. It had been such a relief to turn back into herself that she’d been happy to watch and help, raiding Cassie’s closet to provide clothes as her friend experimented. She didn’t want to freak out tonight.

How strange, to have the DNA of an elephant and a bat inside of her. One weighed several tons, the other under an ounce. One seemed all power and noise. What was it like to be a bat?

She was about to find out. Rachel spent a while helping Cassie feed some of the animals, an evening chore that just could not be put off. This involved carrying a bucket of water and dead rats and mice to tong out to sick animals. Then she removed and folded her outerwear and stood barefoot in an empty stall, trying to ignore the grit and straw digging into her soles.

“You’re going to be fine,” Cassie said earnestly.

“I _know_ I’m going to be fine.” Rachel closed her eyes and stopped putting it off. She imagined it happening smooth and fast, like a cartoon. Her tall, angular human body schwooping down into an ugly-cute fuzzy little beast.

It was neither smooth nor fast, but it seemed like closing her eyes helped. There were patches of almost-itching, a sense of falling, and then real falling as something weird happened with her legs. Rachel’s eyes popped open when that happened and she lost her focus. She saw that everything was sepia, the colors all faded and skewed, and could barely identify the looming canyon walls to either side as the sides of the stall. She also saw that her skin hadn’t shrunk properly. It pooled pale and smooth around her still-big hands, her furry arms and legs, her whole body.

She couldn’t help it, she screamed, or tried to. It came out high and short, barely audible to her still-human ears.

The looming tower of Cassie spoke. “Rachel, it’s okay. I’m right here. Halfway is bad but it’ll be better when you’re done. Think about the bat. Its wings and ears, remember? Come on, girl.”

What else could Rachel do? She concentrated, and the changes continued. It was pretty bad, but - she hung on to this grimly as her bones became fine twigs - bats were much more human-shaped than horses were. This was the worst possible way to get really familiar with how a bat’s wing was like a skeleton hand, deeply webbed.

At the end her ears came online, very suddenly, in a way they’d never been before. There was a wall of impenetrable _sound_ , like static. It came from everywhere and the only part she could sort of understand was Cassie breathing. Then the bat’s instincts were there, launching her up, using her wings and tail to get off the ground and spiraling up to where it was safer. She zipped from one side of the barn to the other, went up to the roof, and went back and forth.

She was afraid - lots of animals in this cave, lots of light, where was the way out? Was there a safe place to sleep? - but it was a manageable fear, after she’d left the dangerous ground. Landing on a rafter, she twitched her ears and analyzed every sound, sorting out what was and wasn’t important, and it started to make sense. Animals breathing and moving and vocalizing. Wood creaking as it cooled. Bugs in the wood, chewing, scuttling. The appealing buzz of tiny wings.

All that noise bounced and echoed to give her a more precise idea of the space around her, its shape. She started to make her own noise, firing off a variety of calls, and the space became much clearer and more precise. Despite the angle and the size of it all, it made sense. This was the barn. That was Cassie, looking for her and obviously completely clueless about where she’d gone, saying, “Rachel?”

<I’m here,> she said, and she had to prod herself first but she dropped off the rafer to flutter around Cassie. It felt like she crossed a great distance very quickly. <Wow, what a rush!>

* * *

It was another minute or so before Rachel was really on top of the bat’s instincts, and then she flew up and out of the loft, though she said she wasn’t going to go far. As Cassie started wrapping up, considering if she wanted to test the morph herself or just head back into the house, she half listened to Rachel’s voice in her head.

It was a rapid succession of _It’s so bright out, but I can hear everything!_ and _I see why Tobias likes flying_ and then _Whoah! Ew! Okay, don’t freak, I just ate a bug_ , which made her giggle. And then her tone changed.

<Cassie, there’s a man outside watching the barn.>

It was like she’d tripped and fallen into a water trough. Cassie felt cold all over. Through stiff lips, she said “Please say it’s just my dad.”

She didn’t know if Rachel could hear her outside, even with bat ears - could the man hear her? She shouldn’t have spoken. No, this had to be nothing. She stared at the main doors to the barn. They were closed but not locked or barred, and she couldn’t change that without making some noise.

<He’s got a cap and a metal badge. Gun too, I think. It’s - it’s hard to be sure, but I think it’s the police officer from before. I didn’t see him at first. He’s just _standing_ there, like a statue.> Rachel came back in through the loft and fluttered around her.

Cassie held her hands out. Rachel, bless her, landed on them, a soft collision, and looked at her out of tiny beady eyes. The webbing of her wings was warm and felt real. “He saw me trying to get closer to the meeting on the beach. What do I do?” she whispered. There were other doors but she had the feeling the cop would see her.

<I don’t… He doesn’t know you’re here. Not for sure. Tobias would have seen him if he was here earlier. You should morph.>

“Morph what?” For a dizzying instant she thought Rachel was going to tell her to become an elephant and fight. Could she -?

<Bat!> Rachel’s ears wiggled and she drew her wings in and launched into the air again. <Cassie, he’s moving, he’s coming for the door! Hide!>

She looked wildly around. The barn, so safe and _normal_ , seemed transformed and hideous. Where could she hide? It would take her too long to climb the ladder to the hayloft, and getting into the med rooms would be noisy, he’d _see_ her, he had a _gun_ \- it should matter that she hadn’t done anything - there, the stall piled with a great heap of hay. It rustled as she waded into it and hunkered down, but that sound was lost under the creaking of the hinges.

Resisting the urge to freeze Cassie scooped hay over herself and tried to concentrate past her pounding heart. Sometimes morphing made noise and she really didn’t want it to. Rachel was saying <Come on, you big jerk - flinch, asshole!> and Cassie could only hope that he didn’t hear that too.

Things clattered elsewhere in the barn and the animals started up a racket, beginning with the growling yowl of the one-eyed bobcat. That would have been more reassuring - she thought Rachel was behind some of it - if the horses hadn’t started to get agitated too. They could only keep horses best described as ‘bombproof’ here, where they were exposed to all kinds of strange smells and sounds, but that didn’t mean some of them didn’t protest.

Cassie didn’t really remember how the morph went, aside from getting bat ears partway through and that not helping much. It was all kind of an anxious blur until she was a bat, fighting her way free of her outer clothes and the hay. She saw and echolocation-saw the cop as she got into the air. He didn’t even glance at her as he pressed the hay with his boot, then moved on. She flew!

<Cassie, is that you? Come on, let’s get out of here.>

It was just the one cop, at least. They found his car just down the road and Rachel half proposed doing something to it, then sighed and said that would just make things more suspicious, so they went back and watched him. After he finished searching the barn he stood outside facing the house, perfectly still, not reacting when a mosquito landed right on his face.

Cassie didn’t know what she would do if he went to the house. Her parents knew about cops, obviously, but they didn’t know about Yeerks. She didn’t have to find out. After a few minutes the cop went back to his car and drove away.

They wiggled into Cassie’s room through a window left open a crack and demorphed. Sitting on her bed, Rachel held her and let Cassie shake.

“We’re going to need to do something about him,” Rachel said when she was calmer. Her face was grim and angry. “Not tonight, but soon.”

* * *

Jake met with the others on the school grounds, in a copse of trees where older kids sometimes smoked. Cassie and Rachel came together, rattled and upset. Apparently the cop had come around the barn. One more thing to worry about. Tobias arrived already morphed hawk, which meant after Rachel talked him into demorphing they had to wait a while for him to recover. Then the others turned into bats. Rachel and Cassie had no trouble, and Tobias only a brief spell of furious agile flight, but it was Marco’s first morph and so waiting for him to get control took several minutes.

They then flew around Jake as he made his way to the main building and through its halls, alerting him to other people before he could be seen in his morphable clothes. He opened the hidden door and went bat himself while they kept watch. The instincts weren't too bad. There was fear, and he had his own moment of flying around wildly, but there was also way more focus and analysis than the green anole. On their way down, while they tried to do something other than fixate on the screams they all talked about bat morph being pretty cool, actually. Even Tobias grudgingly admitted he liked it, though he insisted that hawk was way cooler.

And then things opened up into a great gloomy space that barely registered as a cavern. There were already bats fluttering around, calling in their thin clear voices. They didn't stand out, even flying lower to get a closer look. Everything was much, much bigger than they had ever imagined, which their echolocation painted in clear, merciless detail. Even Tobias’s fervor was dampened. They had a few exchanges about the voluntary Controllers and the scale of it all, and then they were quiet for a while.

It was a little hard to recognize faces with echolocation - architecture, sure, but people were a little abstract. Jake found Tom more by his voice. He was yelling and cursing in a cage when Hork-Bajir walked past, and sitting back and rubbing his arms when they weren’t. Some of the Hork-Bajir working the lines of the piers looked like they were grabbing peoples’ arms hard. Had Jake noticed Tom getting bruised? Was he wearing longer sleeves these days?

<Whoah! That was close! Guys, Taxxons have really long tongues!> Cassie cried. The Taxxons were the only things that took any notice of low-skimming bats.

<Okay, everyone fly higher!> Rachel said immediately, unnecessarily.

<We could demorph around the outbuildings. There are places we could hide,> Jake suggested halfheartedly. It was hard to think.

<Are you crazy?> Marco said immediately. <You have the same bat as me, you’ve gotta be seeing this. This is way too many aliens! They have laser guns! We show our faces and do anything, we _die_!>

It felt like a betrayal to acknowledge that. Tom was in a cage, but he was _Tom_ now. <Marco, Tom’s down there!>

<Yeah, and it sucks! You know what would suck even more? Us getting killed trying to get him out!>

<At least we know now. There has to be another way. Look, I saw a clock. We’ve been down here half an hour. Let’s get out before time gets low,> Rachel put in.

Jake had a moment where he almost spoke to Tom, almost landed somewhere to demorph. The others wouldn’t stop him. Actually they probably wouldn’t leave him to do this by himself. Maybe they could-

And then Tobias said, <I think I found Visser Three.> And that was that.

They flew back up the correct set of stairs much more quietly than they’d flown down. There was a little bit of trouble with the door. Cassie, who seemed to morph most smoothly, started to go back to human to open it. The rest of them picked up on sound on the other side and she started remorphing.

When the Spanish teacher got the door open Cassie was a foot long, not human but visibly too large and deformed for a normal bat. Jake and Rachel flew right into Mr. Tidwell’s startled face and kept his Yeerk from getting a good look as Cassie finished and took off, and they all hauled butt through the open door.

The Animorphs escaped, troubled but intact. Going out a window they saw that cop on his way in. He didn’t notice a small flock of bats in the night.


End file.
